University of Twente Student Theses

Evaluation of creativity

Although there has been written a great amount of scientific papers about creativity, the evaluation of this specific phenomenon has, except for neuroscientific purposes, not been extensively studied yet. The aim of this study was to see whether the output of the word association task could be used to establish differences in creativity levels of the word-association participants. To achieve this, an online survey was conducted in which 81 participants took part, from which two participants were excluded due to inconsistent answering. The survey participants used 5-point likert rating scales which were based on the semantic map from the study conducted by Van der Velde et al. (2015). The participants rated on what level given word associations with their corresponding explanations were: original, novel, common, surprising and understandable. The results suggest that only small differences were found between the word association participants on creativity. The rating scales however did show a significant correlation between each other for both filler items and test items. Further research is needed for the validation of rating scales for creativity, and it is also suggested to investigate if the rating scales can be used for evaluating creativity in problem solving and visual creativity like arts.